The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have created what they refer to as an online Environmental Public Health Tracking Network, a complex tool designed to aggregate, link, combine and monitor environmental health-related data streams from participating programs, including local health departments, NASA, the USGS, the EPA and several health data oriented organizations.
The network is active in California, Connecticut, Florida, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Utah, Washington, Wisconsin, and New York City. There are plans to expand it to five more states this summer, and the CDC hopes to eventually implement it across the country.
In its press release the CDC provides an anecdote demonstrating the system’s possible advantages:
The Utah Department of Health received a call from a citizen concerned about cases of cancer in his neighborhood. In the past, a similar call would have prompted a study that would have taken up to a year to complete, with most of that time spent waiting for data. In less than a day, the Utah Tracking Program was able to let this resident know that the likelihood of cancer in his area was no greater than in the state as a whole.
The network provides information about health effect data, environmental hazard data, exposure data and more.
